This morning Citrix announced the acquisition application mobilization vendor Framehawk for an undisclosed sum as the battle for high performance for corporate Windows apps on mobile devices rages on. Here’s my take:

It's a good acquisition for Citrix and in turn for I&O pros for 3 reasons:

Some of Framehawk's technology will be additive to Citrix's enterprise portfolio. Specifically, Framehawk's framebuffering protocol - called Lightweight Framebuffer Protocol, or LFP - is designed for mobile carrier networks like 4G/LTE where there is often highly variable latency, loss, and jitter. Citrix will add it to their arsenal alongside HDX to improve the end user experience of server-hosted Windows applications on mobile devices for XenDeskop App Edition and XenDesktop.

It will be a boon for DaaS providers' customer experience. Citrix is in the business of building a Desktops-as-a-Service (DaaS) platforms for service providers. One of the barriers to the success of DaaS in the enterprise, and a potential source of value for service providers, is the user experience on mobile devices over mobile networks. Another player to watch the remote desktop/app protocol space for mobile networks is RapidScale.

It's a competitive take-out play as well. Delivering Windows apps from the datacenter to both corporate and employee-owned desktops, laptops and mobile devices is what Citrix does - it's their place in the technology universe. Framehawk's technology approach, while expensive, has some advantages. Citrix was probably starting to see them in more deals as competition.

In Barcelona this week, VMware announced that it is acquiring Desktops-as-a-Service provider, Desktone. This is a market I've been watching for several years, and I think this is good news for both Desktone and VMware customers. On one hand it provides an alternative for VMware prospects who are unsure whether they want to make the investment in ramping up an in-house VDI initiative, and it provides a scale-out option for existing VMware View customers who may be loathe to make additional capital investments to expand their capacity. With Citrix also developing their own homegrown DaaS infrastructure offering for service providers, this move further legitimizes the DaaS market.

Forrester has been tracking the rise in interest in DaaS specifically in our Forrsights surveys of IT decision makers for the past 2 years, which gives us a unique view into the market. In Figure 1 below, we can see the rise in IT decision-maker interest in DaaS relative to on-premise hosted virtual desktops, and see that year-over-year growth of DaaS interest is strong. The market accelerated in part because Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers see it as a way to monetize their existing infrastructure investments.

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Today's re-org at Microsoft comes amidst mixed success as they straddle the gap between capricious individual consumers and the cash-strapped, risk-averse needs of enterprise IT buyers who find themselves years behind the demands of their own capricious workers, who are also consumers when they go home. Windows 8 shows us that Microsoft has more learning to do about where to place those bets, but we also think their work on server, cloud and hybrid cloud is excellent, and that their longer-term strategy is viable. We see this organizational re-alignment as very positive.

The Server and Tools Business becomes Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group

Satya Nadella and Scott Guthrie both have done a great job of driving Agile development and continuous delivery into every team in STB and that is resulting in faster moving and more compelling products and services. They deserve a lot of credit for this and so putting even more under them seems a good thing. The key is whether it is the right things.

For perspective: one of Microsoft's greatest strengths is that they give smart people development tools that are extremely easy to use and deceptively powerful. So much so that generations of developers will commit themselves and careers to mastery of Visual Studio, for example. Microsoft democratizes software development by lowering the barriers to entry like no other company. The shift to cloud gives them the chance to do it again, and the improvements in Visual Studio 2013 shown at BUILD in San Francisco are superb and stretch smoothly from the datacenter to the cloud.

There are very few companies in technology who truly understand that "consumers" and workers are the same *people*. Citrix is one of them. Consumers are consumers because they have jobs, and they get out of bed in the morning to go to a place where they earn money in exchange for their time and work to further their employers' objectives. It really is that simple. Yet most tech companies pay lip service to "consumers" while they target most of their resources on the stated needs of enterprise IT, and the implications of this abstraction are profound.

Citrix lives for achieving the conflicting goals of employee freedom and IT comfort

I believe Citrix understands this and while their POs usually come from enterprise IT, their vision and purpose as a business are to meet the needs of workers in their daily lives. But how? For one thing, this is a business where nuances are important. Precisely where technology providers draw lines between employee needs and IT needs determines whether employees will embrace it or reject it, but we also believe it goes much further. When a person reaches an artificial barrier, or seemingly arbitrary "policy" gets in the way of what they see as their good, honest attempt to get hard work done, their next thought might just be: How stupid do they think I am? Don't they trust me? And so goes the path of building frustration and draining trust out of the organization as a direct result of poor workforce computing strategy and choices, followed by enormous time and energy spent getting around the barriers.

CEO Mark Templeton describes what exceptional IT leadership looks like

There is plenty of speculation in the industry this quarter about the future of Microsoft given the challenges facing Windows 8. Microsoft reported flat revenues in the Windows Division today, citing the transition in the PC industry overall. The good news is that Microsoft is a diversified business with strengthening enterprise multi-year licensing revenues of 16% as one good sign. New licensing models for Office and the release of Microsoft Azure IaaS platform are both positives, with Online Services Revenue up 18%.

On May 5, 1907, The New York Times published a column written that same morning by Mark Twain on the news of his death the day before. "You can assure my Virginia friends," said Twain, "that I will make an exhaustive investigation of this report that I have been lost at sea. If there is any foundation for the report, I will at once apprise the anxious public." The event led to the oft-misquoted phrase: "The report of my death was an exaggeration."

Everyone it seems, loves a good untimely death

So much so, the Wikipedia maintains a list of 219 famous erroneous death reports. Paul McCartney was reported dead on a radio show in 1966, with fans convinced he'd been replaced by an impostor. Pope John Paul II is on the list with the distinction of being the only known triple recipient of early death news reports. And the US House of Representatives cemented its reputation as the best comedy show in town when news of Bob Hope's death was reported on the floor and broadcast on C-SPAN...five years too early. And so it goes with taking news at face value.

Winning teams delight in the 'doing', not the 'winning'
When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Chuck Noll was the head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and his leadership was my first glimpse into what separates teams that win from teams that don't. My favorite quote from Noll exemplifies his view both simply and eloquently: "The thrill isn't in the winning, it's in the doing." What Noll taught his players, including Terry Bradshaw, 'Mean Joe' Green, and Franco Harris, is how to delight in the joy of doing, over the joy of winning. Why? Because the 'winning' won't come unless your passion comes from the 'doing'!

This is why I'm so excited about the explosive trend of BYOD and consumerization of IT on so many levels, from cloud computing to tablets. Workers are putting the joy back into the 'doing' parts of their jobs by exploring different ways of working, and using technologies that often exceed what even the best IT organizations can generally provide. It's also why I think we'll see a rebound of Hosted Virtual Desktops (also known as VDI) through 2013 and beyond. But first, let's look at the data:

IT interest in VDI appears to be on a downward trend

Forrester's annual survey of IT decision-makers revealed a drop in interest and plans for VDI initiatives from 2011 to 2012:

But a shift in the IT drivers for VDI suggests it could actually be an inflection point

What do Google's Gmail, Ericsson's #1 telecom switching systems and Southwest Airlines' Ticketless Passenger Travel all have in common? Yes, they're all spectacular business successes, but what most people don't know is that they're also the direct result of employees working on their own time to solve problems and innovate above and beyond their daily tasks.

Here's another perspective on this reality: What science knows and what business does are 2 different things. These words from a TED talk from Daniel Pink were echoing through my cranium as I polished off my second glass of my brother's famous 1000 calorie-a-glass eggnog last Christmas Eve. When an idea is intriguing enough to occupy my thoughts on Christmas, it's gotta be good.

What got me noodling about all of this was a few days before Christmas, I was asked to come up with ideas for our May Forum on how workforce computing can drive better customer outcomes, and Dan Pink's "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us" which I was reading at the time gave me some fresh fuel to spark my synapses. Pink draws his inspiration from the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - a former University of Chicago behavioral psychologist now at the Drucker Institute, famous for his work in uncovering the conditions necessary for people to be intrinsically motivated to do their best work.

To publish this post, I must first discredit myself. I'm 42, and while I love what I do for a living, Michael Dell is 47 and his company was already doing $1 million a day in business by the time he was 31. I look at guys like that and think: "What the h*** have I been doing with my time?!?" Nevertheless, Dell is a company I've followed more closely than any other but Apple since the mid-2000s, and in the past two years I've had the opportunity to meet with several Dell executives and employees - from Montpellier, France to Austin, Texas.

Because I cover both PC hardware as well as client virtualization here at Forrester, it puts me in regular contact with Dell customers who will inevitably ask what we as a firm think about Dell's latest announcements to go private, just as they have for HP these past several quarters since the circus started over there with Mr. Apotheker. Hopefully what follows here is information and analysis that you as an I&O leader can rely on to develop your own perspective on Dell with more clarity.

Complexity is Dell's enemy

The complexity of Dell as an organization right now is enormous. They have been on a "Quest" to re-invent themselves and go from PC and server vendor, to an end-to-end solutions vendor with the hope that their chief differentiator could be unique software to drive more repeatable solutions delivery, and in turn lower solutions cost. I say the word 'hope' deliberately because to do that means focusing most of their efforts around a handful of solutions that no other vendor could provide. It's a massive undertaking because as a public company, they have to do this while keeping cash-flow going in their lines of business from each acquisition and growing those while they develop the focused solutions. So far, they haven't.

I was at an industry conference recently, standing in the booth of a large PC maker while being indoctrinated with the latest word: "You can manage it with existing tools!" - a marketing director beamed, as he waved a new Windows 8 tablet under my nose. He seemed so happy I thought for a second he might grab my hand and drag me skipping through the tradeshow floor followed by a troupe of merry singing penguins, like a sort of demented convention center edition of Mary Poppins.